I highly recommend people read about floods and wetlands, and how we’ve tended to destroy wetlands in order to build things like highways and buildings. It’s incredible how much damage wetlands mitigate, and just as critically, how much water they stop and put back into the water table.

We do want floods, and we want wetlands to absorb them. Where that isn’t possible, engineering ways to absorb the water in small scale and environmentally friendly ways do exist, too.